Have you got a “killer app” idea?

Our applications architect and chief strategist, Jim Morton, has spent a considerable amount of time locked in a dark room researching, formulating and presenting the various ICT strategies and principles that will drive our work going forward.

Following the approval of this work from the highest level, I am looking to take two key pieces of work, the Applications Strategy and New Wave Applications Approach, and use these to initiate a piece of work to develop a protoype application that can be delivered using mobile devices.

So, I need your help and your great ideas. If you believe your area of work, or even someone else’s, could benefit from the use of mobile applications, please get in touch. We want to enable delivery of services in new and innovative ways using mobile technology.

Drop me an email katesahota@warwickshire.gov.uk or contact me on Twitter @808kate with your ideas and I’ll be in touch. Ideally I’m looking for people who work at Warwickshire County Council so we can work together on this, however if you aren’t a colleague of mine and have a great idea, please send it on anyway and I’ll see what we can rustle up.

Applications Strategy Projects On The Go

There have been many terrible excuses in history, examples including the unlikely:  ”I thought a duck island would fall well within the allowable rules”, the desperate: “The reason I was there because I was badger spotting” and even the inspired: “We got comprehensively beaten because our shirts were the wrong colour“.

I have no such excuses for why I haven’t updated the blog lately, I just haven’t got round to it. However there has been a burst of applications strategy related work so I will try to make sure of a couple of updates each week from now on.

In terms of the work that we are doing at the moment here are the highlights:

Mobile Application: Following on from the success of the Warwickshire iphone application we are creating a new cross-platform version that will take advantage of the maturing standards that allow an app-like experience delivered via web technologies. This means that we will have a basis for delivering information and services across the major mobile platforms using one technique rather than building different versions for different technology platforms. NOTE: We will also be rolling out a minor update to the iphone app in the near future.

EDRMS Repository: We have a number of projects and services in the organisation whose success will require an element of electronic document or record management. This is becoming more relevant as the need for flexible working arrangements and potential property rationalisation grows stronger. Rather than build individual solutions for each requirement we want to build a generic repository based on open standards and the principles of service orientation to create something that can be re-used to satisfy the bulk of our EDRMS needs.

HRMS – Web service enablement: One of the key data sets involved in a large proportion of business processes is our staff and HR information. The main store for this information is an Oracle HRMS implementation that has been historically difficult to interact with, unless a blank cheque has been handy. We have now completed some proof of concept work to show that we can build and use open web services to access the HR information without incurring large costs. The ongoing potential of this R&D work is huge, we plan to expand on it with some further developments (involving the generation of dynamic structure charts from the HR data) before working on how we integrate such services into our wider applications architecture and business processes.

Open Source DBMS research: We are acutely aware of the need to use open source technology efficiently and appropriately over the coming years. To this end we are running a research project with a focus on the DBMS sector to both understand how open source offerings compare with their commercial counterparts as well as gaining an understanding of how open-source, leading edge products could indicate the future roadmap for handling structured data.

Data Visualisation

There are many processes within ICT that require data from the architecture including areas like technology refresh, day-to-day incident management and change control.  The common factors are accurate, up-to-date information delivered when required in a way that can be easily understood.

In the same way Warwickshire Open Data is opening up public information, ICT need to open up information about the architecture itself. This is vital to ensure effective management of both the architecture itself and the services it delivers.

Warwickshire have been working on defining services in a language the organisation can understand and linking them with the logical and physical components of the architecture.  This is helping provide Warwickshire ICT with important information from both a service and a component perspective. Adding to this we are reviewing internal management systems that store data to understand how it can also be exposed and re-used.

We are now at the stage where we have good information about a service, next we need to make that information available and present it in such a way that it can be understood and where possible interactive.

This has led us to start investigating what visualisation techniques and technologies are available. Some areas where we are interested in trying different styles of visualisation are:

• Mapping the wide area network – plotting locations and the links between them.
• Browsing the ITIL Service Catalogue and viewing the underlying technical components
• Listing which services are affected by device ‘X’
• Technical devices  located within each office
• Service status dashboards

Until we have some demonstrations to show here a couple of web sites we have found that could be used to visualise complex data.  We will post back here following the investigation and hopefully have some examples – if only screen shots – of the visualisation techniques and technologies used.

Prefuse – Information Visualisation Toolkit
http://prefuse.org/gallery/

The JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit
http://thejit.org/demos/

Open Data: Building the tools to help you Hack Warwickshire.

In the last month or so we have shamelessly used the iPhone project as a way of kicking off the slightly less sexy, but ultimately much more fulfilling work on open data.

Although we originally wanted something available by the start of March, work has taken slightly longer than anticipated. However things are looking really good and hopefully we will soon be able to join the likes of Lichfield and London in the open data revolution. I can also reveal that we will be running some sort of exciting contest – more sketchy details below.

The main outcome I want us to achieve is establishing a web presence to provide access to the data as well as a framework of standards and processes for getting the data up there, making sure it is in the right formats and ensuring that it is properly maintained.

To this end Terry Rich-Whitehead (twitter: @whitehtj) and Steve Woodward (twitter: @equaliser) have been working on several fronts to make my naïve utopian open data daydreams a reality:

• Defining the formats and standards for data. There is some detail on the types of stuff that the chaps have been working on at http://abigbang.wikidot.com/opendata-project-plan-of-action. As well as defining the authority’s technical approach to open data we also want to start to follow the same standards for our internal systems and data stores – helping to improve efficiency and contribute to our nascent service oriented approach to applicatiuon development.
• Establishing a database to manage the sets of data. This includes a standard XML schema for the metadata that we will associate with each data set – working this way will help in enforcing good practice for data governance and version control. Additionally we will be able to automatically publish an RSS feed when new data sets are added or existing stuff is amended.
• Building a web presence to hold the actual data sets and act as a front end for all users. This will be set up as an adjunct to the Warwickshire web site but will be hosted in the cloud in order to contribute further to the development of our infrastructure strategy. It is highly likely that we will use Ruby on Rails as the platform.

The other thing we have to sort out is how to engage with the audience and ensure that we are providing a useful service. To this end Kate Sahota (twitter: @808kate) is working on setting up a user community (which will hopefully mirror the sort of thing seen at: http://www.datato.org/app/) as well as running the aforementioned “Hack Warwickshire” competition, open to all, where exciting prizes will be up for grabs for the people who can develop the best applications using the data and services that we make available. More details very soon indeed.

The next infrastructure R&D project

So far we have been looking into the concept of cloud computing, both public and private, and how this approach supports the development of service based applications (service oriented architecture approach).

Both public and private clouds present their services through an application programming interface (API) which can be used by developers to provision and configure the required infrastructure resources.  One of the main issues that has been discussed is that of vendor lock-in, where use of unique cloud API ties the consumer into the cloud service provider.

To address this we will research not only the use of an API to configure the infrastructure but the technique of brokering the cloud provider API through a common framework.

This time Tim, Winston and Sukhpal will work together.

Project – (find the Wiki Page here)

• The first part of the project will demonstrate how an infrastructure can be configured to create an elastic cloud infrastructure using the API.  This will involve setting up Amazon EC2 servers and configuring them through the API to scale in line with demand.
  
• The second part of the project will look at (and hopefully demonstrate) how a broker can be used to control the hosted infrastructure by linking with the providers API.

Second Round of R&D Projects

Having completed the first phase of R&D – See here for Wiki updates – the next round of projects have been issued.

Andy McGarry is looking at limiting access to services depending on identity.

Tim West is enjoying a couple of weeks leave.

Sukhpal Shergill Back from a week in sunny England to investigate the concept of cloud based infrastructure.

Winston Castle is getting to grips with web services and storage in the clouds.

Terry Rich Whitehead is investigating Altering the presentation of a service based on identity.

Steve Woodward was lucky enough to be here this time, and chose an envelope that contained a project on physical context as part of identity.

All of this work will be documented on our wiki at http://abigbang.wikidot.com/ – and will be added to over the next 8 weeks.

First round of New R&D projects

As promised we have kicked off the new R&D work today an a glittering showbiz style carnival of song and dance.

The initial projects that each of the team are having a crack at are:

Andy McGarry is looking at using mobile devices as possible factors of authentication.

Tim West is scratching his head as he considers how to provision cloud based infrastructure and services.

Sukhpal Shergill is wrestling with the thorny issue of testing scalable infrastructure.

Winston Castle is manfully getting to grips with setting up a web services management dashboard.

Terry Rich Whitehead is absolutely delighted to be investigating open standards for identity and authentication.

…and finally, because he failed to turn up today, Steve Woodward will be doing some initial investigation into claims based identity – which will be news to him.

All of this work will be documented on our wiki at http://abigbang.wikidot.com/ – well it will be as soon as I work out why I am keep getting an error message while I try to sort things out..

New R&D Work Starting Next Week

After the roaring success of the conceptual applications R&D work (street parades, honours from the palace etc), the powers that be have granted us licence to look at two more key areas that will form part of our ICT architecture.

Firstly, the Infrastructure work will be concentrating on how the traditionally physical elements of computing (storage, processing, connectivity) will be affected by the changes that the world of ICT is currently experiencing. This is likely to focus on the idea of ICT as a utility rather than a physical service, which, I am afraid means that the dreaded C-word is going to get thrown around quite a lot – yes, “Cloud”. Probably be some very bad puns as well. I can only apologise.

Secondly we will also be looking at the question of Identity, this is an area in which we will all see a lot of changes in the coming years. Currently identity is dealt with on a case by case basis in the world of ICT. For every system, web site or company that you deal with the chances are that you have at least one ID and password to remember. As the number of systems that you deal with grows, this is quickly going to become a real problem.

So we want to understand how we can simplify our identity model in order to provide a more straightforward way of handling your various digital roles, while also using these new ways of working to make applications more specific to each individual. This will make our applications more useful, relevant and secure. The aim is to work with existing standards and frameworks, rather than re-inventing the wheel. So, it looks like in addition to the dreaded C-word, the term “Metasystem” could well be cropping up now and again. Apologies once more.

As previously we have a crack team of ICT staff ready to start on a series of projects to test out these concepts. All the outcomes will be documented on our wiki, as well as all sort of exciting updates on this site.

How ICT Strategy is changing the way that WCC works – with mentions for Twitter, YouTube, Ning, Facebook and the iPhone

It has been a fairly hectic (ie plenty of shouting and throwing things around) couple of months for James and I.

We have started to use the evidence we gained from the applications conceptual R&D work to further our ideas about building a service based architecture for the council, to help deliver all of the clever and futuristic technologies that our citizens will want and need in the coming years.

We’ve also got around to finally making a sign for the office door.

The momentum that the strategic approach has gathered has been helped in no small part by the increasing number of news stories and press releases detailing how the major IT suppliers are now trying to flog us all a Utopian cloud-based approach to personal and enterprise computing.

Added to this there are more examples everyday of how organisations are starting to take advantage of new ways of working via the cloud, web based applications, social networking tools and web services.

Our approach is still to do further R&D to define our architecture and then identify the technologies that we want to employ. However this is going to take us a little while. So in order to keep things moving along we have begun working with interested parties in the council to develop some new and innovative services using the concepts, methods and technologies which we want to introduce.

As these services develop and expand we will be producing more updates, our intent is that these pieces of work will provide us with experience and information to help construct the architecture. However we would also expect that if successful these examples will introduce some major changes in how WCC works, both with the public and internally.

Making use of Twitter

After quite a lot of discussion we will be looking at making use of Twitter in  a couple of ways – firstly as an additional channel for distributing WCC news. We will be interested in whether this is an effective idea and if so how to make best use of it. Also in exciting and breaking news it seems we will be starting to get our Councillors providing twitter updates. More news soon.

WCC on YouTube

Our news and media staff have launched a YouTube channel for the WCC. Strategically we believe that there is no point re-inventing the wheel for the distribution of content such as video – although there may be interesting challenges in terms of how we integrate content in such external stores as part of our overall content estate.

iPhone Application

The near-legendary WCC iPhone application is nearing completion. This is a project that will combine a number of the concepts we want to demonstrate while also providing a foundation for developing similar applications for other popular mobile platforms such as Android and Blackberry

The Future of Warwickshire Libraries

We have started to work with the forward thinking management of our libraries service to understand how they can best make use of emerging standards and technologies to provide innovative methods of delivering both traditional library services and also take advantage of social media to explore new types of services for their members. Platforms such as Facebook, Netvibes and Twitter will all be under consideration.

Social Networking and WCC communications

In addition to testing out twitter our news team has also set up a Netvibes page collating Warwickshire related news and information, you can check it out at: http://www.netvibes.com/wccmedia – this helps to show that there is already a wealth of information available via web service feeds.

Collaborative  working for local communities

In order to rapidly provide a platform to enable the work of WCC’s community forums we have adopted the use of the Ning platform to create a social networking platform specifically for this purpose. This was set up by our e-communications team and is now live for all citizens to get involved with. You can visit it here and set up an ID if you want to contribute: http://warwickshirelocalities.ning.com/.

An API for WCC

As part of the iPhone project we are starting to develop an Application Programming Interface for WCC information – so that developers have open and standard methods for interacting with the organisation’s information and services. This is an absolutely key strut of our strategic approach, although the information that will be available initially will be very simple we will no doubt learn some valuable lessons in how such an interface should be constructed, maintained and governed.

Exploiting Cloud/Utility Computing

We are starting to investigate the usage of cloud services for providing live services – in particular the Amazon products for rapidly providing flexible and scalable computing power and electronic storage. More news on this soon.

First R&D Phase Completed

The first part of our planned R&D work concluded yesterday. After doing some sterling work over the last six weeks, the team: Chris, Richard, Tanisha and Terry have returned to their respective teams in triumph although the planned ticker-tape parade around Warwick town square was abandoned due to health and safety concerns.

As hoped, the work carried out has built some concrete proof and much needed practical experience upon the concepts within our strategic vision. The work has been such a success that, prior to moving ahead with the architecture stage purely for applications, we will also be running conceptual R&D phases for two other key areas.

Identity: Understanding how we can will build a unified model for identity in order to provide targeted services and information to individuals – all while simplifying the user experience, integrating with other forms of web identity and ensuring complete security. Shouldn’t be too difficult.

Service Oriented Infrastructure: A terrifyingly technical sounding phrase. In the same way that we are looking to standardise and rationalise applications services to provide a series of building blocks to the organisation, we want to do the same with the elements of ICT that support application delivery. Example areas could include the storage of data, network connectivity and disaster recovery.

The second phase of R&D where we plan to specify the architecture that will be required to realise the benefits of the concepts will now cover all of these areas rather than just focussing on applications. Allowing us to begin building the new ICT architecture more quickly and bring forward all the exciting benefits that this will provide.